Cameron’s stance on the NHS Bill is about more than keeping face

The Prime Minister’s obstinacy shows a hard-right determination to dismantle the state.

I fear Jackie Ashley in an otherwise excellent article overplays the importance of avoiding a ‘loss of face’ by Cameron over the NHS Bill. I believe she missed a more sinister factor – the determination of the Tories, despite the glaring lack of democratic mandate, permanently to dismantle the state to the absolute minimum, delivering to their friends and financial backers running so-called free markets the realisation of their profit-sodden dreams.

It is just another example of the evidence-denying vehemence with which the far-right, in hoc to a global business and financial elite with most of the media in their pockets, have striven to deny the manifest failures of their system of capitalism and brazenly twist the evidence upside-down to place all the blame for the current crises on ‘bloated states’.

In the process millions of working folk are delivered to the unyielding mercies of the global markets and democratic elections rendered increasingly redundant.

[This post is a copy of a letter sent to the Editor of The Guardian in response to Jackie Ashey’s article of 20 February 2012.]

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